Success is obvious
How we hit our product market fit in less than 24 hours.
When building a startup, the first question to ask yourself is:
Do I have a product market fit or not ?
A product market fit is when your market:
- understand your product
- is willing to buy your product
- is telling others about your product
Once you know the answers, you and the way you pitch your audience will change.
Easier said than done, let me tell you about our product market fit.
HackerHouse.Paris
It was a late Monday at Numa (co-working space in Paris) when my friend JH came to me and said :
Have you seen Silicon Valley ? We should build a HackerHouse.”
JH is overflowing with new business ideas, which will keep him busy in the future and also often annoys me, but not this time.
As I will be moving out next year, I was looking for a way to rent my 80m² flat in Paris and I said:
I build the landing page, you pay 10€/day of Facebook ads.
Within 2 hours, our idea was live using a CMS called Squarespace
The day after, we started spreading our idea through Facebook groups / ads, meetups and twitter.
What’s your metrics ?
In less than 24h we had:
- 580 unique visitors
- every 5 minutes, an user sign up
More than numbers, people loved and shared our idea
Metrics tells a lot.
And even more relevant when you target a precise audience as we did for tech people like entrepreneurs, developers, marketing, growth hackers..
Our conversion rate was 11% without any iteration / improvement.
We could proudly say we’ve hit a product market fit and in less than 24h.
Post product market fit
We were exited, happy but also worried because we were not ready.
Fake it until you make it.
My flat did not look like the picture at all and my mom and I were still living in…
Spread your idea, your startup to the world before building any product.
Conclusion
To find your product market fit you gain Traction not Growth.
You invest a given budget usually no more than 1000€ and gain traction.
- Build a landing page and iterate on texts and images make sure your audience understands what you are doing
- Acquire traffic to test your landing page, use tools like Hotjar, Mixpanel to mesure and understand your visitor’s behaviour.
- Listen and talk to your subscribers (emails, facebook likes, twitter followers)
- Don’t spend months, years building your product unless you have a product market fit
I have to recognize some product market fit are obvious, some others might take more time and energy but don’t start anything else until you hit it.
Ready to move in our HackerHouse ? Wait let us finish the works first… Sign-up here.
Few quotes we eat everyday at TheFamily
“Do things that don’t scale”
“Fake it until you make it”
“Success is obvious”